Sarah Monette's Blog, page 19
February 20, 2015
Nebulas (Nebulae?)
The Nebula nominees for 2014 have been announced.
The Goblin Emperor is one of the nominees for Best Novel (!!!!!).
Congratulations to everyone on the list!
The Goblin Emperor is one of the nominees for Best Novel (!!!!!).
Congratulations to everyone on the list!
February 7, 2015
Cool news & Buy Read Talk Redux
The Goblin Emperor is the ALA's best Fantasy for Adult Readers on their 2015 genre fiction reading list.
This seems like a good time to link back (once again) to my Buy, Read, Talk post, because it bears repeating: if you want to support an author whose work you love, buy the book--or ask your library to buy the book, that's equally awesome--and tell people about it. I'm not talking specifically about me here (though obviously I'm not gonna say no), but about any author; this is the most widely applicable piece of advice I think I've ever given.
This seems like a good time to link back (once again) to my Buy, Read, Talk post, because it bears repeating: if you want to support an author whose work you love, buy the book--or ask your library to buy the book, that's equally awesome--and tell people about it. I'm not talking specifically about me here (though obviously I'm not gonna say no), but about any author; this is the most widely applicable piece of advice I think I've ever given.
January 31, 2015
UBC: Lambert, The Gates of Hell
The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage by Andrew LambertMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Lambert wants to prove that Sir John Franklin was neither weak nor indecisive nor a poor leader. Unfortunately, every time he put forward evidence of same, to me, it looked like evidence that Franklin was exactly the things Lambert was trying to prove he wasn't: weak, indecisive, and a very poor leader, especially in a crisis.
Also, this book is not about "Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage." For one thing, part of Lambert's thesis is that Franklin didn't set off into the Arctic to discover the Northwest Passage at all, that he was collecting geomagnetic readings--if he was trying to find anything or reach anything, it was the magnetic north pole. But more importantly, this book isn't really about Franklin's last voyage. It's about Franklin's career beforehand, and about the search for Franklin afterwards--and decidedly about the scientific obsessions of the day--but there's almost no discussion of the voyage of the Erebus and the Terror and what happened to their crews. Since--carrion crow that I am--I was looking for a book about the catastrophe of 1845, I was disappointed that the title of the book and the content of the book did not match very well.
But I wouldn't even have minded that if the book had been a better book. I found Lambert to be a poor historian: e.g., after quoting at length Thomas Arnold's horrific letter to Franklin about Franklin's appointment as governor of Van Diemen's Land: "If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen; and that, even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all the offices of honour or authority in the colony" (95), Lambert, while asserting that "Arnold's potent mix of evangelical faith and moral purpose would be the key to Franklin's government" (95), entirely fails to mention whether Franklin agreed with him about the inheritable nature of iniquity or whether the ideas in this letter had any discernible influence on how he governed. And, honestly, I am going to regard with skepticism any historian of nineteenth century British naval history who can write the sentence, "For a man of faith, used to the honest, open and frank world of naval service where the national good outweighed personal ambition, the experience [of governing Van Diemen's Land] was traumatic" (137)--especially given how the behavior of many of the naval officers in this book blatantly demonstrates its falsity.
Although I grant that there's nothing he can do about the overwhelmingly masculine nature of his subject matter, I was annoyed by his treatment of Jane Franklin, whom he called variously "Jane," "Lady Franklin," and "Lady Jane"--while never taking the liberty of calling her husband just plain "John." It's a small point, but indicative of the potential for much larger problems. He was also utterly uninterested in anyone who was not a commissioned officer, which replicates the social biases of his subject rather than examining them.
Ultimately, I found this book frustrating. Lambert is trying to exculpate Sir John Franklin from the judgment history has made of him, and he has written a poor work of history in the (failed) attempt.
View all my reviews
January 21, 2015
If you're thinking about such things
The Goblin Emperor is eligible for awards this year. That's all I'm going to say on the subject.
January 4, 2015
Kasserman, Fall River Outrage
Fall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England by David Richard KassermanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about Fall River Outrage is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.
I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is not good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)
Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend Fall River Outrage, that's what I'm recommending it for.
View all my reviews
November 27, 2014
3:10 to Yuma
3:10 to Yuma
(1957), dir. Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin
3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale
This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.
The basic story behind 3:10 to Yuma poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:
(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.
(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, without changing his fundamental nature, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.
Essentially, Ben Wade puts himself on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.
What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, oh shit what if they don't GET it? and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it isn't necessary, because Russell Crowe has handled it. Russell Crowe has shown us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.
(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie before we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)
In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as High Noon , is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we like any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about 3:10 to Yuma: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.
(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)
The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is focused in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle focused, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.
This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.
Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--
I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:
and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.
--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade does save them from the Apaches; he is capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.
One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we want him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.
But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker is real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.
And Wade is not sorry.
Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto Pilgrim's Progress, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about Will (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene made a little more sense.
Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.
---
*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.
3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale
This isn't a review (if it were, I'd say that the original is probably the better movie, but I enjoyed the remake more), but a post I'm making because I want to talk about storytelling.
The basic story behind 3:10 to Yuma poses a hell of a challenge to a director and actors, because it requires two trajectories:
(1) obvious and fairly easy, Dan Evans has to go from frustrated, desperate, and frankly pathetic failing rancher to the guy who has the balls to get Ben Wade on the 3:10 to Yuma.
(2) more subtle and much more difficult, Ben Wade, without changing his fundamental nature, has to come to like and admire Dan Evans so much that he gives him a piece of his loyalty.
Essentially, Ben Wade puts himself on the 3:10 to Yuma, and the fundamental task of any version of this movie is to make that piece of quixotism believable.
What frustrates me about the remake is that it panics. Right at the end, it clearly goes, oh shit what if they don't GET it? and makes Dan Evans play True Confessions, both with the story of how he lost his leg and with the reason he's out here ranching in Arizona when he sucks at it. This is a clumsy and painfully obvious maneuver, and it isn't necessary, because Russell Crowe has handled it. Russell Crowe has shown us, every step of the way, why Ben Wade has ended up loyal to Dan Evans. And what Crowe hasn't handled on his own has been taken care of by the chemistry between him and Christian Bale. By the end of the remake, I believe that Wade and Evans are angry, violent, semi-hostile, but genuine friends. I believe that Crowe's Wade, charming sociopath that he is, would (brutally, efficiently) turn on his own men in answer to Charlie Prince gunning down Dan Evans. I believe in his loyalty to Evans. I don't need explanations, and neither does Ben Wade.
(My problem with the original is that it spends too long meandering around in set-up, back and forth between Bisbee and Evans' ranch, in the flat cinematics of its day, so the half of the movie before we get to the hotel room is uninteresting. The remake, at least, is fun to watch all the way through. I've never pretended to be high brow.)
In general, the remake is a lot more nervous about its story than the original, and it clutters it up with everything it can think of: Pinkerton men and Apaches and the Chinese railroad workers and extra characters (the dreadful and doomed Tucker, the substitution of Alan Tudyk's charming veterinarian for the town drunk, the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son*). It also works a lot harder to make its "good" characters sympathetic, just as its "bad" characters are unsalvageably beyond the pale. The original, which is much in the same mold as High Noon , is much more cynical--much less worried about whether we like any of these people. Weirdly, the remake is doing everything it can to avoid the exact thing that is iconic about 3:10 to Yuma: the two adversaries trapped in a hotel room, waiting for a train, poking at each other's sore spots to pass the time, Wade, like Satan in the Garden, trying to tempt Evans to fall, and somehow being tempted into falling himself.
(You can also do all kinds of homosocial readings here--Evans/Wade/Prince is totally a Sedgwickian homosocial triangle except that Wade is also a man, which makes it even MORE homosocial--and the word "love" could be brought into play also, although I'm reluctant to do so, both because it brings all kinds of connotations with it and because I'm not sure I want to imply that Wade and Prince--given how carefully the movie shows us, over and over, that they kill gleefully and without remorse, that they are BAD MEN--are capable of love.)
The original hits this Sartre-esque hurdle head on, and Ford and Heflin do a pretty damn good job. Their problem, really, is that you have to believe Wade's conversion takes place essentially in this hour in this hotel room, and that's just hard to swallow. In terms of plausibility, the remake, by stretching out the journey from Bisbee to Contention and having Evans and Wade rescue each other back and forth, does provide better set up. But the original is focused in a way the remake is not (and it's such a pity the remake is not, because if any two actors could handle focused, it's Crowe and Bale); it uses the claustrophobia of that hotel room, and it uses its willingness to let Dan Evans be a not-completely-sympathetic character--and it uses Ford's Ben Wade, lying on that bed like a lion on a rock, patting his prey with one paw to watch it quiver and jump--to generate tension that the remake just can't. And it sidesteps the obvious emotional notes that the remake jumps on with both feet (Doc Potter's obvious death, every time Charlie Prince reinforces what we already know about Ben Wade's gang, every idiotic and unnecessary thing the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son does, especially Dan Evans' death scene), right up to the end, when it suddenly resolves all its minor notes into a thundering major chord: Wade asks for, receives, and is worthy of Evans' trust; the rain comes.
This is, of course, exactly opposite the remake, which chooses the very end to go from its cheerful, comic book violence, action movie ethos into cruel irony: Evans succeeds and is gunned down by Charlie Prince. Charlie Prince succeeds and is gunned down by Ben Wade (Crowe and Foster play that moment perfectly), the idiotic and unnecessary teenage son has his tragic, too-late realization of his love for his father, blah blah questionable redemption blah, and we end the movie knowing it was all utterly pointless, because Wade's just going to escape again anyway. That's true in the original as well, but in the original, Evans is still alive, he's earned his $200, and the rain has come.
Okay, so this kind of ended up being a review anyway. But I'm really more interested in the way the shared underpinnings of the story bloomed in such different ways, even while Wade and Evans (and Prince) remained essentially the same in the middle of it. And I'm interested in the difficulty in telling the story of that crucial arc, the change in Ben Wade, which isn't a change from bad to good--
I like the way that gets rejected in the remake:
WADE: They're gonna kill you and your father, William. They're gonna laugh while they do it. I think you know that.
WILL: Call 'em off.
WADE: Why should I?
WILL: Because you're not all bad.
WADE: Yes, I am.
WILL: You saved us from those Indians.
WADE: I saved myself.
WILL: You got us through the tunnels. You helped us get away.
WADE: If I had a gun in them tunnels, I would have used it on you.
WILL: I don't believe you.
WADE: Kid, I wouldn't last five minutes leading an outfit like that if I wasn't as rotten as hell.
and Wade's reaction to Evans' death is exactly the reaction that it should be for a very bad man who has come to be loyal to someone unexpected, not the reaction of a man with goodness in him.
--but a shift in loyalty from Prince to Evans. In 1957 Westerns aren't interested in interiority; Ford's Wade may or may not understand his own motives--he just acts on them. Crowe's Wade understands himself perfectly, and neither condemns nor forgives. He knows why, but he will never tell. He's what makes the remake interesting as opposed to merely fun to watch--Will's both right and wrong. Wade does save them from the Apaches; he is capable of good. But he's also the man who murders Tucker with a fork.
One of the things I talked about in my dissertation was the way that revenge tragedies make the audience complicit in revenge: the revenger is the protagonist; we're rooting for him to succeed, and in the upside down morality of the play, we rejoice when he does. Except that revenge tragedies are cruel; they turn themselves rightside up again, and we realize that we are rejoicing in murder. The remake manages exactly the same thing, because the audience, being able to read the genre conventions, knows that Tucker, like Potter, is doomed. He's going to die. And he's so brilliantly hateful (thank you, Kevin Durand) that we want him to die, in the way that we can want characters in books and movies to die because they aren't real.
But then the camera shows us what Wade did to Tucker with that fork, and we are reminded that inside the secondary world of the movie, Tucker is real, and his death is real, and Wade really murdered him with a two-pronged fork while the rest of them slept.
And Wade is not sorry.
Charlie Prince is the embodiment of the paradox, because he's charismatic and funny and he burns people alive. Every time he's on screen, pretty much, the same thing is happening: he charms us and he murders, sometimes in the same breath. And that's the thing, much much more so than the original, that the remake puts Evans against. Evans, who is dead-pan solemn and joyless and burning up inside with the need to save his ranch (the ranch being symbolic, of course, just as the brooch is). The original's Evans is much more of an Everyman caught in a hellacious trap by his own (somewhat unexpected) moral strength; the remake's Evans is a man trapped in the Slough of Despond grasping desperately for his last chance to make it to the Celestial City (I am NOT going to map this movie onto Pilgrim's Progress, I swear to God I am not, even though Potter is clearly Faithful). Bale's Evans carries that kind of allegorical charge (possibly just due to the fact that Bale only has one intensity setting, which is eleven), and I suppose, if you want to switch gears entirely, you can argue that the movie is really about Will (who is the first character we meet, after all) choosing between Wade (BAD) and Evans (GOOD), which--oh dear--does make that damn final scene made a little more sense.
Never mind that. I say the movie is about Wade and Evans, and about a bad man coming to give his loyalty to a good man. I think the original movie holds out the possibility of hope that Wade might reform (the rain comes); the remake does not.
---
*Unrelated to the rest of this, I just want to bitch for a moment about the way that Alice is supplanted by Will in the remake. Alice Evans in the original has a lot more to say and a lot more agency, and in a movie with only two women in it (and the other one is really only there to be a sort of inadvertent Delilah and trap Wade with her Feminine Wiles), that seems kind of important. The idiotic and unnecessary teenage son, who is having the bildungsroman of idiotic and unnecessary teenage sons since the dawn of time (and Jesus Christ the Mary Sue-ism: he gets the drop on Ben Wade and either outbluffs him or genuinely has the balls to shoot him dead? For real?), honestly never feels important to me. And Alice still does.
November 24, 2014
The Goblin Emperor: typos?
I have the proofs for the mass market paperback of The Goblin Emperor. If you have noticed any typos in the hardback, now would be an absolutely SPLENDID time to let me know about them, since I need to turn my corrections in by December 2nd.
Blessings upon all your heads.
Blessings upon all your heads.
November 22, 2014
UBC: Loerzel, Alchemy of Bones
Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897 by Robert LoerzelMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an excellent recounting of a very complicated piece of history: the disappearance of Louise Luetgert on May 1-2 1897, and the investigation, indictment, 2 trials, conviction, and imprisonment of her husband, Adolph Louis Luetgert, for murdering her and then dissolving her body in the basement of his sausage works. Loerzel does a great job with his sources, especially the newspapers (I was dubious at first about all the newspaper drawings he'd included, but he was right to do so; they convey something important that doesn't go easily into words), and he tells the labyrinthine progress of the trials clearly and impartially, without favoring either side. He points out the way that neither prosecution nor defense could put forward a story that didn't have holes and contradictions in it, and he draws the inevitable conclusion: from this distance (and with all of the evidence from the trials having vanished in the intervening century plus), we can't determine whether Luetgert was guilty or innocent, but it is painfully easy to see that he didn't get a fair trial.
(A point that nobody seems to have made, but that is a big stumbling block for me: if Luetgert was innocent, then when Louise Luetgert randomly picked her moment to go crazy and flee into the night, it JUST HAPPENED to be the same night that her husband chose to experiment with making soft soap in the basement of his sausage works, which he'd never done before, AND decided to move the furniture around so his fox terrier could hunt rats, AND sent the night watchman out on two nearly pointless errands, AND, AND, AND . . . The coincidences just have to keep mounting up to make Luetgert's story true.
(Also, the testimony that I found absolutely compelling, and chillingly gruesome, was that of the two workmen who were told to clean up the basement the next morning. They weren't making those details up.)
Luetgert died in Joliet while his attorney was still working on an appeal, so there's no resolution to the story, no final satisfying judgment. Hung jury in his first trial, obvious mistrial in his second trial. I ended up agreeing with Clarence Darrow: "I really believe that he was guilty but that he was convicted on insufficient evidence" (277).
Truth stranger than fiction: Luetgert's sausage works are now loft condominiums.
For more, check out Loerzel's website alchemyofbones.com
View all my reviews
November 20, 2014
Requiem for Prey
REQUIEM FOR PREY
by Sarah Monette
Prey use the word "love" like it means something.
He said he loved me. He asked if I loved him, too. I said I did, because I didn't want to argue. I just wanted to fuck.
I pay for a mass for the dead because I don't know what else to do.
I stand in the back of the church, cold, nervous, smelling fear and incense and mold. The priests are trying not to look at me. It's just me and them and two old, old ladies up in front.
I told them to say the mass in Latin.
They looked at me, the old priest and the young priest. Do you know Latin?
It doesn't matter. I'm not Catholic.
And they leaned away from my smile, like prey always do.
But they took my money.
It's not like he knew Latin, either, but a mass for the dead should be in a dead language. It's not the words that matter.
I'm sorry that he's dead. I can still smell him on me, and I want to get rid of the scent of prey, but I'm going to wait until the mass is done.
Ritual matters.
Death matters.
Love matters, but not like he thought.
I don't know who got him. It might have been me.
They'll find the body in a month or a week. He'll be called John Doe in the morgue. His face will be gone, and his fingers. Maybe somebody will pay to bury him. Maybe they won't. Maybe somebody out there wonders where he is.
He said he didn't have a family. I said I didn't have a family, either. I lied. My family sings with me in the night, blood on our tongues and teeth, blood staining our fur. That's love. Not words.
Prey don't understand that. Dead languages, dead senses, dead bodies, dead masses. It's no wonder they die so feebly.
The mass ends and I slip out.
The sun's going down.
The air smells of rain and cars. And prey.
(This is an old, old piece. An alert and thoughtful reader let me know the link to it was dead. This was the easiest fix.)
by Sarah Monette
Prey use the word "love" like it means something.
He said he loved me. He asked if I loved him, too. I said I did, because I didn't want to argue. I just wanted to fuck.
I pay for a mass for the dead because I don't know what else to do.
I stand in the back of the church, cold, nervous, smelling fear and incense and mold. The priests are trying not to look at me. It's just me and them and two old, old ladies up in front.
I told them to say the mass in Latin.
They looked at me, the old priest and the young priest. Do you know Latin?
It doesn't matter. I'm not Catholic.
And they leaned away from my smile, like prey always do.
But they took my money.
It's not like he knew Latin, either, but a mass for the dead should be in a dead language. It's not the words that matter.
I'm sorry that he's dead. I can still smell him on me, and I want to get rid of the scent of prey, but I'm going to wait until the mass is done.
Ritual matters.
Death matters.
Love matters, but not like he thought.
I don't know who got him. It might have been me.
They'll find the body in a month or a week. He'll be called John Doe in the morgue. His face will be gone, and his fingers. Maybe somebody will pay to bury him. Maybe they won't. Maybe somebody out there wonders where he is.
He said he didn't have a family. I said I didn't have a family, either. I lied. My family sings with me in the night, blood on our tongues and teeth, blood staining our fur. That's love. Not words.
Prey don't understand that. Dead languages, dead senses, dead bodies, dead masses. It's no wonder they die so feebly.
The mass ends and I slip out.
The sun's going down.
The air smells of rain and cars. And prey.
(This is an old, old piece. An alert and thoughtful reader let me know the link to it was dead. This was the easiest fix.)
November 10, 2014
The Goblin Emperor has made it to the semifinals of Goodr...
The Goblin Emperor has made it to the semifinals of Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fantasy. (!!!)
Also, I have turned on the Ask the Author thing on the Author Profile page, so if you want to ask a question about The Goblin Emperor, click and ask, and I'll do my best.
Also, I have turned on the Ask the Author thing on the Author Profile page, so if you want to ask a question about The Goblin Emperor, click and ask, and I'll do my best.
